Valen glanced west.
Light approached.
A streak of brilliance, bright enough to leave afterimages even through the haze, tore across the horizon. It moved too controlled to be a natural meteor, too laden with intent to be mere falling debris.
It left a tail of pale flame behind it, like a comet dragged sideways across the sky.
Mana recoiled everywhere it passed. The great eye overhead narrowed, focusing on the incoming light, its golden iris tightening in clear displeasure.
The streak descended toward the battlefield.
At the last possible moment, it stopped.
The blazing presence halted abruptly above the ground, momentum folding into stillness in a way that made Valen's sense of motion flinch. The tail of light curled inward and vanished as if drawn into a single point.
For a heartbeat, everything froze.
Then the wave hit.
Power burst outward from the arrival point—pure, concentrated force that did not carry the taste of Chaos or Death, but something warmer, and far more ordered. It rolled across the battlefield like an invisible blast front.
Valen's instincts screamed.
He threw his hands out and layered barriers in front of and above himself and Amber in rapid succession—solid-state domes tuned to deflect blunt force rather than elemental impact. One dome. Two. Three.
"Brace," he said.
The wave struck.
For an instant, the world outside the barriers vanished in white pressure and roaring wind. Trees bent nearly double. Blights and demons were flung aside like toys, some torn from the ground entirely and hurled into distant mounds. Even Aelindra's forest spirits staggered, bark cracking along their limbs.
Dust, leaves, broken weapons, and bodies skidded across the ground outside their protection.
When the wave passed, silence fell for a heartbeat.
Then sound returned—groans, the crackle of lingering spells, the distant roars of creatures still capable of moving.
Valen dismissed the damaged dome.
The newcomer stood at the epicenter of the devastation.
She was not tall in an absolute sense, but the space around her bent in subtle ways that made others seem smaller. Her figure was slender, wrapped in layered robes of smoky grey and pale ash that moved as if underwater despite the wind's recent passage.
Her hair was the color of cold ash as well, long and straight, falling down her back like a pale river. Her skin held an unnatural pallor, the faint tone of someone who had spent more time in moonlight and spelllight than under any sun.
Her face was calm, features fine and almost delicate.
Her eyes were not.
They burned with a slow, pale blue fire that did not reflect in the air around them.
Amber stared.
"Ashen Witch," she whispered, voice full of something like awe and something like dread. "Grand-aunt…"
"It is rare for her to leave Luminspire," Amber added, as if reminding herself this was real.
Valen believed it.
He could feel the difference in their life levels.
The Rank 7's aura had been like a bonfire—loud, aggressive, wild at the edges. The woman's presence was something else entirely. Not a fire. A furnace. Contained, directed heat that could melt anything placed within it.
Her gaze swept across the battlefield, taking in torn earth, shattered forest spirits, scattered demons, flickering portals, and the half-extracted soul still struggling in the grip of skeletal hands.
"Vermin," she said softly.
Her voice did not carry in the human sense, but everyone heard it.
"What courage you have," she continued, eyes lifting to the cracked sky, "to come here."
Her hand rose.
Pale blue fire sprang to life around her fingertips, coiling up her arm. It did not waver or drip. It burned with a steady, consuming intensity that seemed to drink in surrounding light.
She pointed toward the nearest open gate—a ragged tear in the air from which lesser demons were still crawling.
The flame leapt.
It crossed the distance in an instant, not as a beam, but as a thin sheet that wrapped itself around the edges of the portal like a closing hand. The fabric of the gate blackened where it touched, then turned the same pale blue as the flame.
The demonic energy on the other side recoiled.
The flame did not merely burn. It drew.
Chaos Energy that had been supporting the gate suddenly changed direction, sucked into the azure fire. The imbalance tore at the structure of the portal itself.
It began to close.
All across the battlefield, other gates reacted.
The Ashen Witch's next gesture was broader, her sleeve sliding back to reveal a thin wrist inscribed with faint, intricate sigils.
Circles of pale light bloomed in the air above the forest, each centered over a visible gate. Lines of power connected them in a vast web, a formation that had likely been laid long before today and only now awakened fully.
The blue fire spread along those lines.
One by one, the gates were seized by that cold flame. Their edges curled inward, shrinking. Demons still halfway through were either forced back or severed mid-transit, their bodies torn apart as the doors closed around them.
The gigantic eye above the valley narrowed further.
As the gates began to shut, the eye reacted.
The golden iris tightened, plates shifting rapidly. The pupil deepened, the void at its center darkening beyond black.
Soul-light began to rise from the battlefield.
Every demon that had harvested souls and spirits, every shred of Chaos Energy that had leaked into the air—threads of that essence were drawn upward now, pulled toward the staring abyss. Even scraps of the destroyed Rank 4 and lesser invaders joined the stream.
The Ashen Witch's gaze flicked up.
Her fire surged.
The pale blue flames that wrapped the closing gates brightened, trying to seize more of the escaping essence, to burn it clean before it reached the eye. Some of the rising soul-threads caught in the fire and vanished, purified to nothing.
But the eye was not passive.
It increased its pull.
The air trembled with the strain as two forces tugged at the same resource—one seeking to erase, the other to salvage. In the end, the eye managed to draw a portion of the gathered souls and Chaos remnants into its pupil before the last gate snapped shut.
The cracks in the sky shuddered.
The Ashen Witch lowered her hand.
Her attention shifted to the spectral hands still gripping the struggling Rank 7.
His body hung between life and death, soul half-torn from his flesh. The ghostly fingers that had pierced his aura were now deeply embedded, drawing not just his life but the Chaos-tainted power he had claimed.
His screams had become hoarse, but they continued.
The death aura pouring from the cracks below him thickened.
The Witch's lips thinned.
She raised her staff—or something that had not been there a heartbeat earlier but now rested in her hand as if it had always belonged there. The rod was a dull, ashen grey, unadorned, more like a walking stick than a mage's ceremonial focus.
She traced a pattern in the air.
A formation bloomed across the forest—vast, intricate circles and sigils flaring to life above and below the ground, lines of pale light intersecting in complex geometry. For a moment, a portion of Dawn Forest's true structure was revealed: anchor points, sealed nodes, buried arrays.
"You old lich," she said, voice cool. "You will stay in your cage."
Her staff came down.
Power from the formation slammed into the spectral hands.
The deathly constructs spasmed. For a moment, their grip tightened, nearly tearing the Rank 7's soul free entirely. Then the binding force of the seal reasserted itself, dragging the hands back.
They did not release their prize.
They took him with them.
The spectral fingers, still wrapped around soul and vessel both, sank back into the abyss below. The crack tried to widen, resisted by the defensive formation. Light-lines thickened around it, pressing inward.
Slowly, reluctantly, the fissure closed.
The death aura thinned as if a great lung had exhaled and gone still again.
In the depths, far below roots and stone and old ritual chambers, an ancient consciousness stirred and then settled.
That scanning consciousness, it thought, in a voice that had not been spoken aloud for centuries, capable of tracing the whole labyrinth at once… dangerous.
If it had lungs, it might have sighed.
This era is troublesome.
On the surface, the last of the spectral glow faded from the closed cracks.
The Ashen Witch surveyed the battlefield.
Dawn Forest held its breath.
For a moment, it seemed as if the world existed only in the space between her inhalation and exhalation.
She turned.
The pale fire in her eyes dimmed by a fraction as she regarded the distant, half-faded eye in the sky. Whatever silent contest had just played out, it appeared finished—for now.
Without a word, the Ashen Witch's form blurred.
The ash-grey robes folded into light. The pale flames that had wrapped her presence drew inward, compressing to a single ember-bright point that shot back toward the western horizon, leaving only a faint afterimage and the lingering echo of her pressure.
She left as abruptly as she had arrived.
Only when her presence vanished did the battlefield remember how to breathe.
Someone shouted.
"It is over!"
The words broke whatever fragile restraint had held the crowd in silence.
A ragged cheer rose from scattered pockets of survivors, spreading outward as realization caught up to exhausted minds. Shields lowered. Bows dipped. Those who were still standing sagged where they were, some falling to their knees in the torn earth.
The battle was not entirely done.
Here and there, Blights and stubborn lesser demons still twitched or struggled to rise. The remaining Rank 4 and above fighters moved almost automatically, finishing them off with efficient strikes, spells, or summoned roots and blades. No flourishes, no displays—just clean, practiced kills from people who had no energy left for anything else.
Within a dozen breaths, the last of the monsters fell.
The forest groaned softly as Aelindra's spirits rooted themselves again, reasserting control over damaged ground and broken trees. Their forms were smaller now, less vibrant, but still standing.
Valen let out a slow breath he had not realized he had been holding.
His barriers were gone. The air tasted of ash, blood, and the fading traces of foreign power.
Beside him, Amber lowered her saber.
The golden light along the blade flickered once, then steadied as her reinforced body caught up with the abrupt end of immediate danger. Sweat and blood streaked her face, but her eyes remained sharp, following the last falling Blight until it lay still.
"It is really over," she said quietly.
Valen watched the sky where the eye's cracks had been.
Not over, he thought. Just… postponed.
He did not say it aloud.
Amber's shoulders eased by a fraction as the shouts and cries of victory spread. Instructors moved among them, checking wounds, counting heads, looking for names that would never answer again.
Valen considered the shattered labyrinth below, the sealed presence beneath Dawn Forest, the eye in the sky, and the blazing light that had come from the west.
It was valuable experience, he thought. But, I need to be stronger if I want to explore this world and watch the events unfold from the sidelines.
He brushed dust from his cloak.
"Our mission can be said to be done," Valen said. "Let us help the wounded before we return."
Amber glanced at him, something weighing behind her gaze.
"You do not look shaken by the events," she said.
"We have chosen the paths of mages and warriors," Valen replied. "This will be part of our life from here on."
Amber studied him for a moment longer, then nodded.
Together, they descended the slope toward the scattered groups of students and instructors still standing in the aftermath, joining the living as they began to take stock of what remained.